Inspired by the literary work of the same name, The Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, the collection is an interpretation of the travels of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo. His fantastic descriptions of the domains of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan are translated into metaphors of the life and works of men, which in their groups originate cities, their particularities and experiences. The words leap from the pages in shapes and shadows as an abstraction of this important work of the 20th century.
In Ercília, to establish the connections that guide the life of the city, the inhabitants extend threads between the edges of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white, according to the relations of kinship, exchange, authority, representation. When the wires are so many that you can no longer cross, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the wires and the supports of the wires remain. From the side of a hill, camped with home furniture, Ercília's refugees look at the tangle of extended threads and the posts that rise in the plain. That remains the city of Ercília, and they are nothing. Rebuild Ercília elsewhere. They weave a similar figure with the threads, but they would like it to be more complicated and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and move with the houses even further. In this way, when traveling in the territory of Ercília, you are faced with the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls that do not last, without the bones of the dead that roll with the wind: cobwebs of intricate relationships looking for a way .
In Esmeraldina, an aquatic city, a network of canals and a network of streets overlap and intersect. To go from one place to another, you can always choose between the land route and the boat: and, as in Esmeraldina, the shortest line between two points is not a straight line but a zigzag that branches in tortuous variants, the paths There are not two but many that open to the passer-by, and they increase even more for those who alternate boat trips and transfers on land. In this way, the inhabitants of Esmeraldina are spared the tedium of traveling the same paths every day (...).
Now I will tell you what is extraordinary about the city of Zenobia: although located on dry ground, it rises on very high stilts, and the houses are made of bamboo and zinc, with many baileys and balconies, placed at different heights, with walkways that exceed each other, connected by wooden stairs and suspended walkways, transposed by belvederes covered by conical porches, boxes of water tanks, pinwheels, unfolding pulleys, lines and cranes. It is not known what need or commandment or desire induced the founders of Zenobia to give this form to the city, so it is not known whether it was satisfied by the city as it is today, developed, perhaps, through superimpositions of the indecipherable initial project. But what is known with certainty is that when a Zenobia resident is asked to describe a happy life, he always imagines a city like Zenobia, with its stilts and hanging stairs, perhaps a totally different Zenobia, unfurling banners and stars. , but always built from a combination of elements from the initial model (...).
Leaving there and walking for three days towards the uprising, you will find Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with pewter, a crystal theater, a golden rooster that crows all the time. mornings at the top of a tower. All these beauties the traveler already knows from having seen them in other cities. But the peculiarity of this is that whoever arrives on a September night, when the days become shorter and the multicolored lamps are lit together on the doors of the taverns, and from a terrace you can hear the voice of a woman who screams: uh !, he is led to envy those who imagine having lived a night like this and who at the time felt happy.
If you want to believe, great. Now I will tell you how Octavia is made, a spider citizen. There is a precipice in the middle of two rugged mountains: the city is empty, connected to the two peaks by wires and chains and walkways. You walk on wooden trails, taking care not to stick your foot in between intervals, or cling to the hemp threads. There is nothing below for hundreds and hundreds of meters: some clouds pass; further down, you can see the bottom of the gorge. This is the base of the city: a network that serves as a passage and support. Everything else, instead of rising, hangs down: rope ladders, hammocks, bag-shaped houses, clotheslines, navy-shaped terraces, water bottles, gas nozzles, roasting pans, baskets hung with string. , cargo lifts, showers, trapezes and rings for games, cable cars, lamps, vases with plants of hanging foliage. Suspended over the abyss, the lives of the inhabitants of Octavia are less uncertain than those of other cities. They know that the network will not resist more than that.
When you get to Tecla, you don't see much of the city, hidden behind the fences, cloth defenses, scaffolding, metal armor, wooden bridges suspended by cables or supported by trestles, rope ladders, jute bales . To the question: Why does the construction of Tecla take so long ?, the inhabitants, without failing to hoist buckets, to lower iron cables, to move long brushes up and down, answer:
- So that the destruction doesn't start. - And, asked if they fear that after the removal of the scaffolding the city will start to crumble and fall apart, they add quickly, whispering: - Not just the city.
If, unsatisfied with the answers, someone spies through the pens, he sees cranes that lift other cranes, frames that line other frames, beams that support other beams.
- What's the point of so much construction? -- question. - What is the purpose of a city under construction if not a city? Where is the plan that you follow, the project?
- We will show it as soon as the working day is finished; now we cannot be interrupted - they reply.
Work stops at sunset. Night falls on the construction sites. It's a starry night.
"Here's the project," they say.
There is no city more willing to enjoy life and avoid afflictions than Eusápia. And so that the leap from life to death is less abrupt, the inhabitants built an identical copy of the city underground. The corpses, desiccated so that the skeletons remain covered with yellow skin, are taken down and continue to perform ancient activities. Of these, the preferred ones are those that reproduce moments of carefree: most are positioned around served tables, or placed in dance positions or in the gesture of playing trumpet. But all the Eusápia trades and professions of the living are recreated in the basement, at least those that the living carried out with more satisfaction than boredom (...). They say that every time they go down they find a change in the lower Eusápia; the dead present innovations in their city; not many, but certainly the result of thoughtful reflection, not of passing whims. From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead is not recognized. And the living, in order not to be left behind, want to do everything that the hooded people tell about the news of the dead. Thus, the Eusapia of the living began to copy its underground copy. They say that it is not only now that this occurs: in reality, it was the dead who built the Eusapia from above similar to their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no way of knowing who are the living and who are the dead.
In Beersheba, the following belief is transmitted: that suspended in the sky there is another Beersheba, where the virtues and the highest feelings of the city gravitate, and that, if the earthly Beersheba takes the celestial as a model, they will become a single city . The image that tradition divulges is of a city of solid gold, with silver studs and diamond doors, a jewel city, full of carvings and bezels, which supreme and laborious research, applied to materials of supreme value, can produce. Faithful to this belief, the inhabitants of Beersabea worship everything that evokes the celestial city: they accumulate noble metals and rare stones, renounce the ephemeral, elaborate forms of composed composure. These inhabitants also believe that there is another Beersabea in the subterranean, receptacle of everything that occurs to them of despicable and unworthy, and they constantly strive to eliminate any connection or similarity with the submerged twin from the Emerged Beersabea (...)
After marching for seven days through the woods, those who go to Bauci do not realize that they have arrived. The thin steps that rise from the ground at a great distance from each other and that are lost above the clouds support the city. You go up stairs. The inhabitants are rarely seen on land: they have everything necessary up there and prefer not to go down. No part of the city touches the ground except for the long flamingo legs on which it rests, and on bright days, a diaphanous and angular shadow that is reflected in the foliage. There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Bauci: that they hate the land; who respect it to the point of avoiding any contact; who love it the way it was before they existed and with binoculars and telescopes pointed downwards, they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating its absence in fascination.
Clarisse, glorious city, has a troubled history. Several times it decayed and flourished, always maintaining the first Clarisse as an unparalleled model of all splendors, which, compared to the current state of the city, does not cease to sigh at every turn of stars. In the centuries of degradation, the city, emptied because of plagues, reduced in stature because of the collapse of beams and cornices and the collapse of land, rusted and blocked by negligence or vacations by maintenance workers, was slowly repopulated with hordes of people. survivors emerged from attics and pits like feral rats driven by the urge to revolve and gnaw and who at the same time gathered and arranged themselves like birds in a nest. They clung to everything that could be removed from where it was and placed elsewhere with another use: the brocade curtains ended up serving as sheets; in the cinerary marble urns, they planted basil; the wrought-iron railings pulled out of the windows of the gynaeceans were used to roast cat meat over marquetry fires (...) .. The order of succession of the times had been lost; that there was a first Clarisse is a widespread belief, but there is no evidence to show it; the capitals may have been first in the chicken coops and then in the temples, the marble urns may have been sown first with basil and then with the bones of the dead. We only know with certainty the following: a certain number of objects move in a certain space, sometimes submerged by a large number of new objects, sometimes consumed without being replaced; the rule is always to mix them up and try to put them back in place. Perhaps Clarisse has always been just a mix of shattered, scarcely assorted, obsolete knick-knacks.
There are two ways to reach Despina: by ship or by camel. The city presents itself differently for those arriving by land or by sea.
The camel driver who sees the spiers of skyscrapers, the radar antennas, the startles of the white and red windsocks, the smoke from the chimneys, imagines a ship; you know it's a city, but imagine it as a vessel that can take you away from the desert, a sailing ship that is about to set sail, with the wind that fills its sails not yet fully released, or a steamship with a boiler that vibrates in the iron hull, and imagine all the ports, the overseas goods that cranes unload on the quays, the taverns where crews with different flags break bottles on each other's heads, the illuminated ground windows, each with a woman who combs her hair. .
In the coastal fog the sailor distinguishes the shape of the hump of a camel, of a saddle embroidered with gleaming fringes between two spotted humpbacks that sway forward; he knows it's a city, but he imagines it as a camel from whose saddlebag hang skins and saddlebags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and he finds himself in the command of a long caravan that takes him away from the desert of the sea towards an oasis of fresh water in the thick shade of palm trees, towards palaces with thick whitewashed walls, tiled courtyards where dancers dance barefoot and move their arms in and out of the veil.
Each city receives the shape of the desert it opposes; this is how the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts."
In that direction, after six days and seven nights, you reach Zobeide, a white city, well exposed to the light, with streets that turn around themselves like a skein. Here is what is said about its foundation: men from different nations had the same dream - they saw a woman run at night in an unknown city, backwards, with long hair and naked. They dreamed that they were chasing her. They ran from one side to the other, but she lost them. After the dream, they left in search of that city; they didn't find her, but they found each other; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In the layout of the streets, each one retraced the course of his pursuit; at the point where he had lost the traces of the fugitive, he arranged the spaces and the wall differently than in the dream so that this time she could not escape.
The city was Zobeide, where they settled in the hope that one night the scene would repeat itself. None of them, neither in sleep nor awake, saw the woman again. The city streets were the ones that took them to work every morning, unrelated to the pursuit of the dream. Which, in turn, he had long forgotten.
New men arrived from other countries, who had had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide they recognized something from the dream's streets, and changed places by porticoes and stairs so that the route was more similar to that of the persecuted woman and so that at the point where she had disappeared there was no escape.
The newcomers did not understand what attracted these people to Zobeide, an ugly city, a trap.
Upon entering the territory that has Eutropia as its capital, the traveler does not see one but many cities, all of the same size and not dissimilar to each other, scattered around across a vast, undulating plateau. Eutropia is not just one of these cities but all together; only one is inhabited, the others are deserted; and this happens in turns. I explain in what way. On the day when the inhabitants of Eutropia feel boredom and no one can stand their work, their relatives, the house and the street, the debts, the people who must greet or who greet them, at that moment all citizens decide to move go to the neighboring town that is waiting there, empty and as if it were new, where each one will choose another job, another woman, see other landscapes when opening the windows, spend the evenings with other pastimes and inappropriate friendships. Thus, their lives are renewed from change to change, through cities that, due to exposure or slopes or water courses or winds, present themselves with some difference between them. Since their society is organized without great differences in wealth or authority, the transitions from one function to the other take place almost without friction; variety is ensured by multiple tasks, so many that in the space of a lifetime they rarely return to work that once belonged to them.
In this way the city repeats an identical life by moving up and down on its empty board. The inhabitants go back to recite the same scenes with different actors, tell the same anecdotes with different combinations of words; they gaped their mouths alternately with equal yawns. Unique among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains identical to itself. Mercury, god of fickleness, patron of the city, performed this ambiguous miracle.
Isaura, city of a thousand wells, is presumed to be situated on top of a deep underground lake. The city extended exclusively to the places where the inhabitants were able to extract water by digging long vertical holes in the earth: its verdant perimeter reproduces that of the dark banks of the submerged lake, an invisible landscape conditions the visible landscape, everything that moves in light from the sun is propelled by the cloistered waves that break under the limestone sky of the rocks.
As a result, Isaura presents two different religions. The city's gods, according to some, live in the depths, in the black lake that nourishes the subterranean veins. According to others, the gods live in the buckets that, raised by the ropes, appear on the parapets of the wells, in the pulleys that turn, in the buckets of the waterwheels, in the levers of the pumps, in the blades of the windmills that draw water from the excavations, in the towers of scaffolds that support the drilling of rigs, in reservoirs suspended by stilts on top of buildings, in the narrow arches of aqueducts, in all water columns, vertical pipes, catches, valves, until reaching the weathervane above the scaffolding of Isaura, city that moves upwards.
I don't know if Armila is like that because it is unfinished or demolished, if behind it there is a spell or a mere whim. The fact is that there are no walls, no floors: there is nothing to make it look like a city, except the water pipes, which rise vertically where there should be houses and branch out where there should be floors: a forest of pipes that end in faucets, showers, siphons, valves. Out in the open, they bleach washbasins or bathtubs or other pieces of marble, like late fruit that hang from the branches. One would say that the plumbers finished their work and left before the masons arrived; or else its indestructible facilities had withstood catastrophe, earthquake, or termite corrosion. Abandoned before or after being inhabited, Armila cannot be said to be deserted. At any time of the day, looking up through the pipes, it is not uncommon to see one or more young women, slender, of small stature, stretched out in the sun inside the bathtubs, hunched under the showers suspended in the void, performing ablutions, or that they dry themselves, or that they perfume themselves, or that they comb their long hair in front of the mirror. In the sun, the streams of water poured from the showers shine, the jets from the faucets, the spurts, the sprays, the foam on the sponges. The explanation I arrived at is the following: the watercourses channeled in Armila's pipelines still remain under the control of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traversing the underground veins, they find it easy to advance through the aquatic realm, bursting into the fountains, discovering new mirrors, new games, new ways to enjoy the water. It may be that their invasion has driven men away, or it may be that Armila was built by men as an offering to captivate the benevolence of nymphs offended by the violation of the waters. In any case, they look happy now, these girls: they sing in the morning.
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The city of Sofronia is made up of two half cities. In the first, there is the great roller coaster of dizzying slopes, the carousel of spokes formed by chains, the ferris wheel with revolving cabins, the death globe with upside-down motorcyclists, the circus dome with the trapezoids tied in the middle. The second half city is made of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, factories, palaces, slaughterhouse, school and all the rest. One of the half cities is fixed, the other is temporary and, when its season ends, it is unscrewed, dismantled and taken away, transferred to the vacant lots of another half city. So every year comes the day when the masons detach the marble pediments, collapse the stone walls, the cement pillars, dismantle the ministry, the monument, the docks, the oil refinery, the hospital, carry the winches to follow the itinerary of each year from place to place. The half Sofronia of target-shooting and carousels remains, with the scream suspended from the little train of the roller coaster upside down, and you start counting how many months, how many days to wait until the caravan returns and the whole life starts over.
The ancients built Valdrada on the edge of a lake, with houses full of overlapping verandas and with streets suspended over the water leading to balustrade parapets. In this way, the traveler upon arrival is faced with two cities: one perpendicular over the lake and the other reflected upside down. Nothing exists and nothing happens in the first Valdrada without being repeated in the second, because the city was built in such a way that each of its points was reflected by its mirror, and the Valdrada in the water contains not only all the grooves and reliefs on the façades that rise above the lake but also the interior of the rooms with the ceilings and floors, the perspective of the corridors, the mirrors of the cupboards. The inhabitants of Valdrada know that all their actions are simultaneously that act and its mirror image, which has the special dignity of images, and this awareness prevents them from abandoning themselves to chance and oblivion, even for a single moment. When lovers with naked bodies roll skin against skin in search of the most pleasurable position or when assassins stick the knife into the dark veins of the neck and the further the blade slides between the tendons, the more the blood flows, it is not so much the mating or the beheading, but the mating and beheading of their clear, cold images in the mirror. Sometimes the mirror increases the value of things, sometimes it cancels them out. Not everything that appears to be worth above the mirror resists itself reflected in the mirror. The two twin cities are not the same, because nothing that happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: for each face or gesture, there is a corresponding face or gesture inverted point by point in the mirror. The two Valdradas live for each other, looking into each other's eyes continuously, but without loving each other.
Those who travel without knowing what to expect from the city they will find at the end of the road, ask what the royal palace, barracks, mill, theatre, the bazaar will be like. In every city in the empire, the buildings are different and arranged in different ways: but as soon as the stranger arrives in the unknown city and casts his gaze through the pagoda domes and skylights and barns, following the path of channels or gardens, garbage dumps , then distinguishes which are the palaces of the princes, which are the temples of the great priests, the tavern, the prison, the area. Thus - some say - the hypothesis is confirmed that each person has in mind a city made exclusively of differences, a city without figures and without form, filled with particular cities.
That's not what happens in Zoé. In all parts of the city, alternately, it is possible to sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold coins, undress, reign, sell, consult oracles. Any pyramid-shaped roof can house both the lazaretto for the lepers and the spa for the odalisques. The traveler walks from one side to the other and is filled with doubts: unable to distinguish the points of the city, the points that he keeps distinct in his mind become confused. The following conclusion is reached: if existence at all times is unique, the city of Zoé is the place of indivisible existence. But then what is the city's motive? What is the line that separates the inside from the outside, the pounding of wheels from the howling of wolves?